for your death, though you have
plotted mine. I have been faithful to you, and loved you, until you
made this attempt."

"Will you forgive me before I die?" said she; "for die I must, now that
I know you will quit me!" Uttering these words, she threw herself on
the floor with violence, and her head coming into contact with the
broken fragments of the basin, she cut herself, and bled so copiously
that she fainted. The old woman had fled, and I was left alone with
her, for poor little Sophy was frightened, and had hidden herself.

I lifted Carlotta from the floor, and placing her in a chair, I washed
her face with cold water; and having stanched the blood, I laid her on
her bed, when she began to breathe and to sob convulsively. I sat
myself by her side; and as I contemplated her pale face, and witnessed
her grief, I fell into a train of melancholy retrospection on my
numerous acts of vice and folly.

"How many warnings," said I, "how many lessons am I to receive before I
shall reform? How narrowly have I escaped being sent to my account
`unaneled' and unprepared! What must have been my situation if I had at
this moment been called into the presence of my offended Creator? This
poor girl is pure and innocent, compared with me, taking into
consideration the advantages of education on my side, and the want of it
on hers. What has produced all this misery and the dreadful
consequences which might have ensued, but my folly in trifling with the
feelings of an innocent girl, and winning her affections merely to
gratify my own vanity; at the same time that I have formed a connection
with this unhappy creature, the breaking of which will never cause me
one hour's regret, while it will leave her in misery, and will, in all
probability, embitter all her future existence? What shall I do?
Forgive, as I hope to be forgiven: the fault was more mine than hers."

I then knelt down and most fervently repeated the Lord's Prayer, adding
some words of thanksgiving, for my undeserved escape from death. I rose
up and kissed her cold, damp fore head; she was sensible of my kindness,
and her poor head found relief in a flood of tears. Her eyes again
gazed on me, sparkling with gratitude and love, after all she had gone
through. I endeavoured to compose her; the loss of blood had produced
the best effects; and, having succeeded in calming her conflicting
passions, she fell into a sound sleep.

The reader who knows the West Indi